Where'd you go, Bernadette?

Where'd you go, Bernadette? is beautifully acted, well-directed movie about a brilliant woman who has lost her way.  Richard Linklater, the movie's auteur, directs the movie in his most nondescript and fluent "invisible" style -- at no point,does the film's style draw attention to the way that it was made.  It has no gorgeous shots (except a few images of icy mountains and icebergs ostensibly in the Antarctic -- the credits reveal that the landscapes were filmed in Greenland), no flashy or fast editing, and much of the picture, curiously enough, was made in Pittsburgh, standing in for the more expensive Seattle where the bulk of the film is set.  The camera set ups are utilitarian and some of the movie, particularly the scenes in the Antarctic, are obviously shot on sets nowhere near the polar circle.  Linklater's unassuming style is on display in a scene that many directors would turn into a showy quasi- action sequence -- Bernadette (Cate Blanchett) has so landscaped her backyard that the steep hill is unstable and, during heavy rain, a massive landslides pours down the slope and knocks down a wall in a suburban house where Bernadette's neighbor and nemesis (played by Katherine Wiig) is hosting a party.  Linklater uses three close-ups showing soil slipping on the hillside -- the shots are close, abstract, and without any landscape or environmental context.  This is intercut with the party.  We see some wet mud flowing under a door, then, two quick shots of the backwall giving way and mud pouring into the party.  Most film makers would milk the sequence for suspense, create a threat of injury, and use some flashy CGI effects to show the torrent of mud and debris pouring down the hill -- Linklater knows that the landslide is wholly extraneous to the actual themes of his film and, therefore, doesn't interrupt the story with anything that would distract us from the main themes in his narrative.  This sort of discipline is rare among filmmakers and contributes to the powerful effect that the movie makes as a whole.  (Linklater has always been more interested in extracting remarkable performances out of his actors than he is in staging action scenes -- in fact, rare among American directors he has no interest in directing fights or combat or action at all.  Some of his films have been openly experimental, for instance A Scanner Darkly and Boyhood -- but the nature of his experimentation is more philosophical than pictorial.  With Steven Soderburgh, he's our best advocate for the "invisible directing" style that characterizes the old masters like Howard Hawks and Budd Boettcher.)

Bernadette Fox is a great architect who was awarded a McArthur Genius grant and, after a calamity involving a house she built in LA, fled that scene and moved with her family to Seattle.  At the film's start, she seems to have no interest in architecture and has become a kind of recluse.  She is given more than adequate grounds for her reclusiveness -- after four miscarriages, her daughter was born with a defective heart and required several neo-natal surgeries in order to survive.  This stress seems to have knocked her out of the professional orbit where she was once well-known and even feted.  No longer creative in architecture, she has channeled her intelligence into tinkering with the decaying mansion where she lives, fighting with the neighbors whom she derides, and hiding from the world.  Most of all, she has focused her energy on her relationship with her daughter which is almost frighteningly close and intense.  Bernadette has agreed to take her daughter on a trip to Antarctica with her remote husband, a Google executive played by Billy Crudup.  But she's terrified of the trip and seeks ways to avoid making the journey.  The film is very clever at showing us Bernadette's reasoning from her perspective -- we don't really sense how crazy she has become until the film is about half-way finished.  After some bizarre behavior, Bernadette's husband hires a perky therapist to work with his troubled wife -- the therapist diagnoses her as suffering from severe anxiety and adjustment disorder.  When the therapist and her husband try to "intervene" and have her hospitalized, Bernadette flees and, in fact, ends up on an adventure by herself in Antarctica.  

In some ways, the film is a bit like a Woody Allen movie -- it features fantastically intelligent and articular characters who harangue one another is a witty and engaging way.  (Cate Blanchett is particularly good in her manic discussion with a former colleague on the things that she despises about Seattle).  In another way, the film resembles Five Easy Pieces even down to the rainy Pacific Northwest setting.  Like the concert pianist played by Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, Bernadette has suppressed the most important part of her personality, her creative energy, and this has caused her extreme distress.  Like Nicholson's character, she's rude and outspoken and lashes out at those around her -- she alienates and estranges all of those around her.  But the picture develops along its own organic lines and becomes extremely affecting emotionally. (All of the film's performances are excellent and Wiig in particular gives a very striking and surprising turn to her role that, in most films, would be that of a simple villain).  This is the sort of picture that is designed for female suburban audiences -- it's charmingly aspirational, focuses on creativity which, I think, is an important theme for gifted women who may be relegated to the role of mere mother and wife, and is intensely emotional particularly in the film's depiction of the relationship between the troubled mother and the spunky teenage daughter -- and it is, in fact, heart-warming.  I spent much of the last half of the movie dabbing at my eyes.  The movie doesn't exactly stick with you because it's pleasures are really readily portable -- the pleasures the film offers are so intrinsic to the material and so embedded in the relationships that the movie depicts that they don't really apply to other settings.  Parts of the movie are probably wildly improbable although I didn't register any of that implausibility as condescending to the audience or disturbing in any way.  Linklater is one of our best film-makers and this modest picture is one of his best movies.  (I should note that the advertising campaign for this film which leads the viewer to expect a vulgar SNL-style comedy is totally misleading.  But it's an excellent film and I hope the meretricious ad campaign helps the movie find an audience.)